Reparation
by Cutieqtpie
Summary: Vaughn POV through season 3, includes spoilers for


TITLE: Reparation  
  
SUMMARY: Vaughn's thoughts in flashback from the end of "Blood Ties." Spoilers if you have not seen the episode, or any of season 3.  
  
RATING: PG-13 for suicidal subject matter  
  
DISCLAIMER: I am not JJ Abrams, nor do I claim to be. I'm just a mere minion trying to do my part to make the world a better place full of Alias fan fiction. Lol. Vaughn is not mine (at least not in reality), and neither are any of the other characters mentioned. Yeah, they're all JJ's too, lucky bastard. ;-)  
  
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I don't deserve to live. I don't want to live anymore. At six years old I thought my life was over, but this hurts even more than it did then. I'm 36 years old. I should just be living a normal life. Instead, I'm living in what seems like someone's idea of a sick joke.  
  
Since I found out, I've been thinking about it a lot. What do I have to live for anymore? My wife is the enemy I've been fighting against for the past two years. I lost the woman I loved two years ago and then had a second chance but then lost that too. What do I have left? Everything has been turned upside down. Everything I thought I had was never mine to begin with.  
  
Suicide sounds like such an ugly word. Yet it's always been there in the back of my mind. When she died the first time I held the gun in my hands and stared the Cyclops in the eye. I wondered if I could be man enough to actually pull the trigger. It fell out of my hands when I realized I had been sobbing for over twenty minutes. I managed to pull myself together, make it through the service. Throw her ashes into the beautiful Pacific Ocean, knowing that perhaps this was what she always wanted to, a quiet but quick way out. And the option was always there. I could be with her if I really wanted to.  
  
I met Lauren and for a while my thoughts disappeared. She was everything Sydney was not, and I thought that was what I wanted. I still thought about her though. Five minutes before I walked into the church I looked out onto that same Pacific Ocean and thought about throwing myself in, just to be nearer to her one more time. Why did she still have this effect on me, I asked myself. She haunted me beyond the grave. Maybe I went through with the ceremony to prove to her that I could get over her. And then a month later it all came crashing down again.  
  
How could she have survived? How could I not have found her? Did I let her down? Going to Hong Kong was the hardest thing I've ever experienced. Walking into that room having no good way of saying what needed to be said. Seeing her was like flatlining and then being brought back to life with a defibrillator. Just this jolt. She wrapped her arms around me and pressed her body against mine like I had been dreaming about for 23 months. And I made myself into the voice of reason and forced myself not to fall back into the spell she's always had on me.  
  
I think I felt relieved in North Korea. I wasn't scared of dying, not with her right next to me. I always expected it to end this way. There was never a question that she would be the only thing on my mind when it finally happened. But once again I didn't get to appreciate that death. We were saved and taken back to LA, where we had to go on living like we hadn't almost been killed, and that the thing you say to people when you think you're about to die hadn't really been said. How do you explain to someone that you love them, that you've always loved them, that you will always love them, but you can't be with them.  
  
And then I found out the truth about Lauren. Over ten years of intelligence training, and I couldn't figure out that my own wife was Covenant. And everything was a lie. I feel ripped apart, physically and emotionally and mentally and any other way you can be ripped apart. I'm back at the beginning, wondering why I'm even bothering to go on anymore. I don't want to live in a charade. I don't want to be her.  
  
I was shaving one day and I nicked a place on my chin and I stood and looked at the drops of blood on the razor. I just watched it for about ten minutes, once again wondering if I could be man enough to find the courage to go through with it. Instead I crawled into the shower and sobbed more as the water cascaded around me.  
  
The truth about my father. Another ghost that won't go away. The truth has always been looming but never showing itself, and now it comes out. There was a reason Irina killed him. He took away her daughter. One daughter had already been removed from her life, and now another, the only link to that time in her life was gone as well. And William Vaughn had been "eliminated." And that young boy was forced to go through life without the man he had worshipped for as long as he could remember, the man that was the reason for him joining the CIA in the first place. Yet another decision based on a lie. I feel so naïve some times.  
  
As I'm being tortured, I once again realize that this is probably the end. But Sydney is not here with me this time. Just a woman I thought I knew and a man that has been out to screw me over since the first time we met. But ironically he was right, I wish I were dead right now, in fact I'm praying for it. Please god, just kill me, I don't even want to be alive anymore, don't you know that? Or are you punishing me for forcing you out of my life two years ago when you took the only woman I ever truly loved.  
  
And the next time I wake up I'm in a hospital. And her face is looking at me with that look I know all too well. And I still wish I were dead. 


End file.
